Crowe Sisters — free 45-minute reads, every fifth Sunday.
The Butterfly Clip A 45-minute read. Free every fifth Sunday.
A pink plastic butterfly hair clip arrives at a Marathon crime scene before the detective does. Dr. Elena Crowe recognizes it instantly. So does her sister, Detective Mara Crowe. Twenty years ago their mother disappeared wearing that same clip.
The package arrived at the crime scene before she did. Inside the clear evidence bag was a child’s pink hair clip, the plastic one with the cracked butterfly. Detective Mara Crowe held it up against the fading light and said, “Victim number three. Same as the others.” Dr. Elena Crowe didn’t answer. She was staring at the clip and counting the years. Twenty. Exactly twenty years since their mother had worn that same clip the morning she walked out and never came back.
It had come at ten after four, Mara said. A padded yellow mailer set on the cap of the seawall behind the house, no postage, no name. Deputy Ortiz found it walking the property line and had the sense to leave it where it sat until the crime scene tech photographed it in place, with a scale, from four angles. Then the tech slit it along the bottom seam with a scalpel so the flap and anything on the adhesive stayed intact.
Elena had been in the Keys less than five hours. She’d left her apartment in Miami at seven, taken the Turnpike to Florida City and the long two-lane run through the mangroves to Key Largo, then crawled behind a boat trailer from Tavernier to Islamorada. At the Fairfield Inn on the north end of Marathon, the clerk gave her a second-floor room over the parking lot. She dropped her suitcase on the luggage rack, lay down on top of the spread in her clothes, meaning to rest ten minutes, and woke forty minutes later with the air conditioner rattling and the room gone dim behind the blackout curtains.